MATTIAS VIKTORIN received his B.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees in social anthropology from Stockholm University, and is currently senior lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. Previously he has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2006–2007) and the Secretary of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (2009–2011).

MATTIAS VIKTORIN received his B.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees in social anthropology from Stockholm University, and is currently senior lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. Previously he has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2006–2007); Secretary of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (2009–2011); research fellow at Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (2009–2011); and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (2011–2013). He is the author of Exercising Peace: Conflict Preventionism, Neoliberalism, and the New Military (2008) and co-editor of Antropologi och tid (2013).

RESEARCH

My three main areas of interest are the history of anthropology, literature, and art; organizational anthropology; and the anthropology of religion.

In my current project, "Expressing Siberian Exile: Literature, Language, and the Resistance of the Real," which is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, I explore nineteenth century narratives of Siberian exile. The writers in focus––Ewa Feliñska, Anton Chekhov, George Kennan, Peter Kropotkin, and others—were all facing difficulties in their attempts to represent the social realities and human experiences of exile. In Siberia they had encountered a world that seemed to resist literary representation. This led them to experiment, in various ways, with novel modes of expression. As such, their narratives allow for a “re-reading” of some of the constitutive features of early modernism and its reconfiguration of literature, religion, and science.

Much of my previous research has centered on organizational culture in contemporary society. In my Ph.D. project, "Exercising Peace: Conflict Preventionism, Neoliberalism, and the New Military," I took the changing role of the military as a starting point for exploring a set of broader ongoing processes at the intersection of security and humanitarianism. I used the concept “conflict preventionism” to investigate the transformation of the military, the proliferation of civil-military cooperation, and the increasing interest in managing violent conflicts within a single framework. This allowed me to analyze how various actors, concepts, and organizational techniques converge in emergent forms of intervention.

In my post-doc project, "Future for Sale: Temporality, Methodology, and Knowledge in the Work of Market Research Consultancies," I investigated market research consultancies in Sweden. I focused on three aspects of their organizational work. First, I was interested in the temporal orientation toward the future that guides much of their business; next, I investigated the actual methods they use to make “future markets” appear as objects about which knowledge is possible; and finally, I asked what legitimate knowledge in this context is coming to mean.

I am currently designing a new project that will explore emergent forms of Christianity in Sweden in relation to secularization, digitalization, and individualization. Insights from my previous research have led me to focus here not on what particular people actually believe (the “intellectualist approach” to religion), nor on the reproduction of a religious community (the “symbolic approach”), but instead on how existing organizations—e.g., the Church of Sweden—respond to contemporary problems. What I want to understand in particular is how the convergence of secularization, individualism, and digital technologies have enabled new forms and modes through which religiosity have begun to emerge.